Jim Blaut, who died last week (Nov. 13, 2000), was one of
the foremost Marxist writers on the national question in recent decades. I have
just finished reading his book, The National Question: Decolonising the Theory
of Nationalism, published by Zed Books in 1987 and now unfortunately out of
print. Among other things, I was struck by the many ways in which this work
addresses and illuminates issues that have been debated in recent months on
this list. Jim himself posted to the List last July an excerpt from the book
that dealt with Stalin's Marxism and the National Question, in answer to the
centrist DSP of Australia, which has apparently embraced Stalin's 1913
approach.

His chapter on Tom Nairn, an editor of New Left Review who
published a book "The Break-Up of Britain" in the mid-1970s, goes a
long way toward answering the questions raised by those List subscribers who
were recently speculating on why NLR had so little to say about the Irish
question. (Nairn looked to the Protestant community of Northern Ireland as one
of the "national" forces that would help to emancipate Great Britain
from its archaic constitutional structure!)

But the major contribution of Blaut's book is its
discussion, throughout, of how Lenin's analysis redefined the parameters and
implications of the national question in revolutionary strategy. He takes aim
in particular at two misconceptions that were characteristic of pre-1914
Marxism: the belief that the national struggle is autonomous from the class
struggle, and the analysis of other Marxists who recognized that national
struggles were class struggles but limited the progressive validity of
nationalism to the ideology of the bourgeoisie characteristic of an ascendant
capitalism. Lenin, in contrast, modified his position over the years, and
during World War I carried out a fundamental shift in his assessment of
nationalism by incorporating his analysis of the national question into his
developing theory of imperialism.

Blaut's major concern in writing this book was to counter
the mistaken theories being propagated by many Marxists concerning the Puerto
Rican struggle, with which Blaut was closely identified. But the book is one of
the most interesting and valuable discussions on the national question I have
read. The following extract, from his critique of Eric Hobsbawm (an English
ex-Stalinist who treats all nationalism today as "irrational")
describes the transformation of Lenin's thinking on the national question.

Richard Fidler

------------------------------------

Lenin's Theory

In a sense there are two Leninist theories of nationalism or
the national question. Hobsbawm's essential error lies in his neglect of the second
and later theory. This second theory is not associated with some intellectual
'break', some biographical phenomenon of intellectual maturation of the sort
which certain Marxists claim to find in the life and ideas of Karl Marx. In
Lenin's case it was the World War which forced this great thinker to try to
come up with an explanation for a historical crisis which was catastrophic,
unexpected (at least in its effects on the workers' movement), and not
comprehensible within the corpus of Marxist theory as it existed at that time.
(I will call this corpus of pre-war ideas 'post-classical Marxism' to
distinguish it from the 'classical' Marxism of the Marx-Engels period.)
Postclassical Marxism contained a body of accepted ideas about the national
question, national movements, and the emergence of nation states during the
period of 'rising capitalism'. There were indeed differences of theory and
practice, but most of the central ideas were held in common. Lenin broke with
this post-classical corpus of ideas on national struggle (and on other matters
of theory, notably imperialism) in his writings of the period 1915-1920. By
1920 he held a radically different view of national struggle.

The emergence of this distinctively Leninist theory of
nationalism or national struggle has tended to be neglected for a number of
reasons, one being the high visibility of Lenin's earlier debates with
Luxemburg, another being the prominence of Stalin's 1913 essay on national struggle,
'Marxism and the National Question', in most respects a typical example of
post-classical Marxist thought which nonetheless continued to be accepted as
biblical dogma all through the Stalin period and beyond. (See Chapter 5 below.
[The discussion on Stalin was posted by Jim to this List on July 23, 2000.]) In
1913 and thereabouts it was agreed by all the major theorists on the national
question, including Lenin, Stalin, Luxemburg, Bauer, and Kautsky, that the set
of phenomena embracing national movements and the emergence of nation states
was characteristic only of the period of early or rising capitalism. As Marx
and Engels had said before them, nationalism would tend to quieten down or
disappear as capitalism matured, because mature capitalism was fully
international: because the modern bourgeoisie had become or were becoming a
world-wide class with common, world-wide interests, and with no interest in
maintaining the 'fetters' (as they were called) of national barriers. In a
nutshell: national struggle was part of the struggle of the rising bourgeoisie,
was thus innately 'bourgeois', and would have no function after capitalism had
matured and the bourgeoisie had 'risen'.[59] Some Marxists then extended this
argument to the point where it became transformed into an argument against all
national struggles, and against any participation by socialists or workers in
such struggles. This view we associate mainly with Luxemburg, although others
agreed with her. She maintained that the era of nationalism was definitively
ended; that new nation states were very unlikely to emerge anywhere; that
national movements were thus rather idle and utopian, and they should not be
supported for that reason and also because they were now, in the period of
mature capitalism, reactionary.[60]

Lenin replied to Luxemburg by attacking this extended or
elaborated argument, but holding to the basic position they both shared with
post-classical Marxism in general. He said in effect: of course national
movements and national struggles are characteristic of the period of rising
capitalism, and of course they will tend to die out, along with the national
question in general, as capitalism matures. But, he said, the maturation of
capitalism is very uneven over the face of the earth. In eastern Europe
capitalism is still rising, and national movements may still, in certain
circumstances, have a chance of success, of forming new nation states.
Furthermore, the peculiarly barbarous character of the Russian Empire leads to
intense national oppression, hence to intense and popular resistance which may
take the form of national movements. And finally, the peculiar characteristics
of the Tsarist empire tend to unite the national movements in oppressed nations
with the struggle for bourgeois political democracy - another feature of the
period of rising capitalism - and hence to bring the national question close to
the centre of the socialists' struggles for democratic rights.[61] There is of
course much more than this to Lenin's pre-war position (and to Luxemburg's),
but what I have said will suffice for our purposes. And what I have said would
probably not be challenged by Hobsbawm.

We have to note two additional elements for a theory of
nationalism which were enunciated by Lenin before the start of the World War.
The first of these was the proposition that discussions about nationalism could
not be limited to the nationalism of small and oppressed nations and aspiring
national movements. What he called 'great nation nationalism' tended to be
ignored by Marxists notably, he pointed out, by Luxemburg - but it was
something that had to be taken account of as seriously as, and indeed more
seriously than, the nationalism of those who aspired to state independence.[62]
In essence, great nation nationalism was the dialectical opposing force to
national movements. It was also, in its ideological form, easily disguised
behind arguments that great states are more progressive, more suitable for
modern capitalism, etc., than small ones. In later years Lenin elaborated this
idea of great nation nationalism into a major theoretical proposition about the
intensification of great nation nationalism in the era of imperialism. In the
pre-war period he was far ahead of his contemporaries in understanding the
nature and significance of great nation nationalism.

The second theoretical element was an extension of the
argument that national movements in eastern Europe were still viable,
important, and in some cases progressive. Lenin began to argue this clear and
simple proposition: national movements in the advanced capitalist countries of
western Europe are a thing of the past; those of eastern European imperial
states, a thing of the present; those of the colonial world, a thing of the
future.[63] In other words, anti-colonial national movements and those of
semi-colonies (like China) were progressive and viable, and deserved support.
Hobsbawm agrees on this matter: the Leninist position, he notes correctly,
'widened the category of "national movements" regarded as essentially
"progressive" in their impact much beyond Marx's and Engels'
own'.[64] On the other hand, Hobsbawm badly neglects the other Leninist
proposition, that great nation nationalism needs to be looked at through the
same theoretical lens as the nationalism of small and oppressed nations and
national movements aspiring to independence. I suppose he accepts the
proposition in principle, but there is scarcely any mention of great nation nationalism
in his discussions of nationalism and when he uses the word 'nationalism' it
seems to refer almost always to movements for autonomy or independence.

Lenin developed his theory of imperialism mainly in 1915 and
1916. It was inherently a political theory, designed to explain the political
realities of a war which was destroying the European workers movements, and
necessary to reveal the basic features of the era in which the war was taking
place. The overt problem was flag-waving nationalism, but Lenin did not make
the mistake of imagining this to be some merely ideological epidemic. It was
clear that a profound change in both the economics and politics of capitalism
was taking place. Capitalism had always sought to export its crises by spatial
expansion, mainly colonial and semi-colonial. With the rise of finance capital
and monopoly capitalism the need for expansion (including the export of
capital) increased very greatly, but, the earth being finite in extent, fields
for new territorial expansion had disappeared. Therefore, according to, Lenin,
two basically novel and very powerful political forces had come into play:
first, struggles among great powers to 'repartition' (Lenin's word) the already
'partitioned' world, which necessarily implied political struggles among the
powers and thus eventually world war, and second, the growth of national
liberation movements in colonies and semi-colonies, roughly in proportion to
the intensifying economic exploitation and deepening national oppression which the
new era brought forth.[65] This analysis led Lenin to a series of fundamental
theorems about nationalism.

(1) Nationalism is not merely characteristic of the era of
early or 'rising' capitalism, dying down as capitalism matures, and associated
only with the early capitalist process of state formation. In the era of
imperialism, the 20th Century, nationalism becomes more intense than ever, and
acquires new functions. Great nation nationalism becomes more important and
powerful than ever because of the need to repartition economic space, and this
leads to world war. This newly intensified great power nationalism is not
precisely a new phenomenon, since great power nationalism already had its own
inglorious history prior to the 20th Century; it is new in that it is immensely
increased in intensity and in significance, leading to the Great War and all
its consequences.[66]

(2) The nationalism of colonies and semi-colonies is called
into being by the intensification of exploitation and oppression. In an
important way, this is a new phenomenon, or, to be more precise (since
anti-colonial resistance also had its history), it cannot be assimilated to the
theory of national movements which emerge during the rise of capitalism and
have as their (as it were) purpose or goal the simple creation of a bourgeois
state. The nature of colonialism is such that producing classes suffer along
with whatever young or incipient bourgeoisie may exist. Therefore the national
liberation movements in colonies and semi-colonies are profoundly different
from the national movements of earlier oppressed nations such as those in
non-colonial portions of the Tsarist empire. It is not innately a bourgeois
struggle against feudal forces for the creation of a classical bourgeois state.
It is a multi-class struggle directed primarily against imperialism.[67]

(3) The old-fashioned nationalism of rising capitalism
continues to be found in various parts of the world, but it is distinct from,
and now less important than, the two new forms: the intensified bourgeois
nationalism of the great capitalist states and the national liberation
struggles in colonies and semi-colonies. What all three forms have in common is
struggle over the sovereignty of states. And indeed for Lenin this is the essence
of the national question, and the subject matter for the theory of nationalism.

Lenin's ideas on colonial liberation struggles had evolved
in his later years. By 1920 Lenin was convinced that workers and other
exploited classes, with the proletariat in the van, could take the leading role
in such struggles sooner or later. Even when these movements had bourgeois
leadership they were struggles against monopoly capitalism and could be turned
onto a socialist trajectory or a noncapitalist trajectory which would result in
socialism.[68] On the basis (mainly) of this reasoning Lenin quite
categorically argued that national independence movements must be supported[69]
(Hobsbawm notes only Lenin's pre-war position, which did not call for categorical
or unconditional support of national movements in oppressed nations.[70] And it
was clear to Lenin that colonial liberation movements were a new form of
national movement in the sense that they could not be assimilated to the old
model of the rise of capitalism. New states and new nations were emerging under
conditions of monopoly capitalism, not early capitalism. Some of them were part
of the rise of socialism.[71]

All of this adds up to a new Marxist theory of nationalism,
new in the precise sense that it implies the negation of some important
theorems of the earlier theory, the view characteristic of post-classical
Marxism. Nationalism is not simply a part of the state-forming process of the
young, rising bourgeoisie; of early capitalism. It is also characteristic of
monopoly capitalism. And it is also characteristic of the struggle for
socialism during the period when monopoly capitalism still dominates most of
the earth, a period during which the rise of socialism must take the form (from
a geographical perspective) of a multiplicity of struggles to create socialist
states. Nationalism is not an innately bourgeois phenomenon: in the colonial
and semi-colonial countries the national struggle is engaged in by workers and
peasants as well as the conventional 'rising bourgeoisie', and workers and
peasants can, under the right circumstances and with the right politics and
tactics, take the lead. In the case of these struggles, though not necessarily
in other sorts of national struggles, the proper posture for socialists is to
provide full and unqualified support.

The difference between Hobsbawm's approach to the theory of
nationalism and Lenin's should now be fairly clear. Hobsbawm builds his theory
on the basis of post-classical Marxist thought, which includes Lenin's
pre-World War writings. Hobsbawm appears to maintain that all nationalism, if
it is indeed rational, is part of the state forming process associated with the
rise of capitalism. He certainly believes that national liberation movements in
colonies are likely to be progressive but he seems to assimilate these, in
their turn, to the rise of capitalism in a straightforward diffusion model:
capitalism arose in Europe in the 19th Century and then spread outwards across
the world, bringing nationalism with it.[72] Lenin, on the other hand,
postulates that national movements in colonial countries are essentially
different, and may either be struggles for socialism, not capitalism, or will
at least be struggles against monopoly capitalism. And they are struggles which
deserve pretty much unconditional support, unlike earlier national movements
involved in the rise of capitalism, movements to which socialists were expected
to concede the unconditional right of self-determination, of independent statehood,
but movements which socialists were not enjoined to support.

Hobsbawm's second definite category of national processes
consists of the 'irrational' nationalism of our time (and that of the
'Ruritanias' of yesterday), a category which appears to include all sorts of
cases of 20th Century national movements including those of colonies and those
of ethnically distinct regions within advanced capitalist countries.
Nationalisms of this type are 'devoid of any discernible rational theory': they
have no theory and they succumb to no theory. Lenin, on the other hand,
provides a theory that broadly explains these movements. Perhaps the matter
should be put negatively: the old Marxist theory could not explain major
tendencies towards state formation, with their national movements, in the era
of mature or modern capitalism. It was Lenin, then, who added certain crucial
propositions to the Marxist theory of nationalism and deleted others which were
inapplicable to the modern period. Lenin may not have prevised the special
sorts of nationalism which one now finds in some developed capitalist countries
(for example, Scottish or Basque nationalism). But the fact that nationalism
would be intense and important in the era of imperialism is very explicit in
Lenin's theory.

Lenin's theory also provides an explanation for a phenomenon
which clearly puzzles Hobsbawm to the point where he must make fun of it: the
process leading to the creation of small peripheral states, some of them
'mini-states'. ('Any speck in the Pacific' with 'enough beaches and pretty
girls to become a tourist paradise . . .'; 'Kuwaitis . . . treated like the
English milord of old'[73] a 'vast Saharan republic resting on 60,000
nomads'[74]). It is a fairly direct deduction from Lenin's theory of
nationalism to argue as follows: the overall force of superexploitation in
colonies and semi-colonies, and its attendant political force, national
oppression, is the basic, underlying cause of the rise of national movements in
these sorts of areas. Hence the cause has nothing intrinsically to do with the
size of the eventual independent state. Presumably there are forces of
nationalism in every town and village over great portions of the colonial world.
What turns some of the resulting movements into struggles which eventually
create mini-states is a completely different set of circumstances. Usually it
is nothing more than the conversion of a 'mini-colony' into a
'mini-independent-state'.

The national liberation process would be at work almost
regardless of the size and shape of the territory to be liberated. It is in
essence the same force in India as in the Seychelles, in Nigeria as in Grenada.
I think it most unlikely that any leader of any genuine national liberation
movement anywhere fails to see the desirability of a large and powerful state.
But for an oppressed, exploited, colonized people, a mini-state is likely to
appear better than no state at all. And the conditions which lead national
movements to create small states, occasionally mini-states, conditions which
include the colonizer's cartography and also matters of ethnic complexity,
political ambitions of local despots, intrigues of the CIA and multinational
corporations, etc., all such forces are fundamentally distinct from the basic
and prior force, the national struggle against colonial exploitation and
oppression. Here, I believe, is Hobsbawm's most serious error. A large share of
the political problems of the world of modern states he attributes to one or
another sort of irrational nationalism. But the national struggle of colonial
areas is perfectly rational: it is a struggle for freedom.

Reading Hobsbawm and certain other modern Marxists on the
national question I have the eerie feeling of being transported back into the
midst of the debate which was raging on this question in 1915 and 1916, the
debate in which (as I mentioned previously) Lenin characterized the position of
his opponents as 'imperialist economism'. This was part of the larger debate in
and around the Zimmerwald Left concerning the wartime crisis and the issues of
theory and practice which it raised. The issue of wartime annexations by
belligerents (e.g., Germany's occupation of Belgium) became fused with the
issue of the liberation of colonies (including Ireland), and with the issue of
whether or not to retain the demand for selfdetermination in the Bolshevik
programme and whether or not to assert this principle on a wider scale than the
Russian. All such questions merged into a great debate on the national
question, probably the most important one in the history of Marxism. On one
side of the debate were Lenin along with what must have been a majority of the
Bolshevik participants, and doubtless other socialists. On the other side were
Bukharin, Pyatakov, Radek, Luxemburg (who was in jail in Germany and
participated indirectly, through her 'Junius' pamphlet), Polish socialists
close to Luxemburg, and others.

One central issue was the right of self-determination of
nations as a general principle, and the question whether and how socialists
should fight for the liberation of oppressed nations. Among many arguments put
forward by Lenin's opponents (as I will describe them for brevity's sake) were
the following:

(1) Big states are more progressive than small states, and
it is therefore reactionary to advocate the secession, or even the right of
secession, of portions of these big states. The Luxemburgians and others
extended this argument to the matter of the secession of colonies, which was
judged by them to be something to advocate publicly but with no confidence in
the possibility, perhaps even the desirability, of realization under
capitalism, since colonies were parts of big states.[75]

(2) 'Imperialism', said Radek and two Polish associates,
'represents the tendency of finance capital to outgrow the bounds of a national
state'.[76] This is the argument that capitalism is now a single international
system, and thus the national state (or any state) is rendered obsolete, while
under socialism ultimately there will be, of course, no states at all.

(3) To advocate the right of self-determination and, beyond
that, to advocate secession (or liberation) for any country is to throw the
workers of that country into the arms of the bourgeoisie, and at the same time
to cut off this community of workers from their brother workers of the larger
(or oppressing) state. In sum: socialists are interested only in
self-determination for the working class, not for the nation (which in any case
no longer exists except as an abstraction, thanks to the differentiation of its
population into warring classes). Bukharin advanced this argument even after
the October revolution; it seemed to him to be an important reason for refusing
the right of self-determination, of secession, to the nations within
post-Tsarist Russia.[77]

(4) National liberation movements, whether or not they are
progressive, are inherently bourgeois, because nation state formation is a
dimension of the rise of the bourgeoisie, of capitalism, and not part of the
rise of socialism.

Lenin forcefully and successfully answered the opponents of
self-determination and national liberation, responding to the first two of the
four arguments in the 1915-1916 debates and dealing with the latter two
arguments somewhat later. Lenin also found a phrase which seemed to provide an
accurate label for his opponents. He described them as 'imperialist economists'
in a series of articles written in 1916, the first of which (directed mainly
against Bukharin) was called 'The Nascent Trend of Imperialist Economism'.[78]
As we noted earlier, Lenin considered an 'imperialist economist' to be someone
who advocated a new form of the old disease called 'economism' (i.e., stressing
economic forces and neglecting the political ones), a form suited to the new
era of imperialism. Why were the arguments of Lenin's opponents 'economistic'?
Because, he said, they were asserting that the new era of imperialism is one
which renders obsolete all partial and local struggles for political democracy,
including most pointedly struggles for national independence. Why obsolete?
Because, they claim, capitalism in its imperialist stage is now fully
international, and this means that the principle of scale or concentration
renders small states irrelevant and struggles to create small states
reactionary, while the internationalization of this economic system,
capitalism, makes all individual states, large or small, obsolete. Thus the
arguments (1) and (2).

Lenin's answer deserves to be read, not summarized. His most
telling points were perhaps the following.

(1) The Marxist principle of concentration is an economic
principle, not a political one:

The law of economic
concentration, of the victory of large-scale production over small, is
recognized in our own and the Erfurt programmes . . . Nowhere is the law of
political or state concentration recognized . . . Everyone would laugh at this
amusing imperialist Economism if it were expressed openly and if, parallel with
the law that small-scale production is ousted by large-scale production, there
were presented another 'law' . . . of small states being ousted by big
ones!'[79]

(2) In the era of imperialism, political struggles are no
less important than they were in capitalism's preceding era, because capitalism
is inherently a political system as well as an economic system; or, stated
differently, the capitalist economic system cannot function without a political
environment which it controls, and that political environment is mainly
supplied by states and state power, in the present era as in others. In Lenin's
words:

A vast distance
separates the era of the establishment of capitalism and the national state
from the era of the collapse of the national state and the eve of the collapse
of capitalism itself.'[80]

The question is the
relation of economics to politics: the relation of economic conditions and the
economic content of imperialism to a certain political form.'[81]

(3) In the same text there is the kernel of an argument that
national movements need not be inherently bourgeois - as there is the kernel of
such an argument in Marx's and Engels' writings about Ireland many years
earlier- but this argument in its full form, as an assertion that working
masses and socialists can and should lead national movements in colonial
countries, was developed in Lenin's later works.[82]

(4) The argument that national liberation struggles 'divide
the class' or 'unite workers with bourgeoisie' was answered by Lenin in a
number of subtle arguments. In 1918 he responded to Bukharin by pointing out
that in no modern country, including even capitalist Germany and revolutionary
Russia, had the'differentiation of the classes' approached anything like
completion; hence, the nation was still a reality, not an abstraction.[83]
(Elsewhere in later writings he went further, discussing, for instance, the
distinctiveness and cohesiveness of national cultures, which would persist
after the withering away of states.)[84]

It would take us too far afield to discuss in full Lenin's
response to those whom he called 'imperialist economists'. In the course of
this debate Lenin asserted, I think for the first time, the general principle
that liberation struggles in colonies should be supported categorically,
providing only that they were genuine and serious, of the type of a 'national
uprising or a serious popular struggle against oppression'.[85] In later
writings he stated the principle more fully.[86] It clearly followed from his
analysis of the politics of imperialism.

The direction of my own argument should by now be apparent.
The four generalizations advanced by Lenin's opponents are very similar to the
arguments of those Marxists today who assert that (1) the creation of
mini-states and even nation-states in general is irrational or reactionary, (2)
capitalism is now fully international and its characteristic institutions,
multinationals and other giant corporations, are able to transcend the bounds
of national states at will, thus rendering all states more or less obsolete,
(3) to advocate the secession or independence of any state, colonial or
otherwise, is to 'throw the workers into the arms of the bourgeoisie',
'conciliate the nationalists', 'divide the working class', or 'undermine
proletarian internationalism', and (4) national struggles are essentially
bourgeois struggles, because they are inherently part of the rise of
capitalism, and thus all nationalism is 'bourgeois nationalism'.

Hobsbawm, as I think I have shown in the present essay,
subscribes to generalizations (1) and (2).[87] As to (3), Hobsbawm is
frustratingly ambiguous. He asserts that nationalism -- meaning in context any
national movement whatever' -- by definition subordinates all other interests
to those of its specific "nation,",[88] while nationalists - meaning
in context any fighters for state independence, anywhere - 'are by definition
unconcerned with anything except their private collective'.[89] It is
unthinkable that Hobsbawm would mean such statements to apply to the past
struggles in Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, and other socialist countries which gained
victory in a national liberation struggle, or to struggles such as those in
Puerto Rico and Namibia where the same goal is being sought today.[90] These
statements are of course devastatingly correct when applied to reactionary and
unrealistic national movements. Yet Hobsbawm proffers no qualifications. Hence
the ambiguity.

Hobsbawm is again ambiguous about generalization (4). He
speaks of 'the category of movements directed against imperialist exploitation
and representing something like the "bourgeois-democratic phase" in
the development of backward countries', a 'category' which seems in context to
include all anti-colonial national movements. Thus he seems almost to argue the
diffusionist thesis that nationalism equals rising capitalism, and to deny that
Lenin was right to categorize anti-colonial national movements as 'national
revolutionary' and not 'bourgeois democratic' (a question of theory, not simply
terminology).[91] Hobsbawm has explicitly called it an error to equate
nationalism only with capitalism and thus to dismiss contemporary nationalisms
as 'troublesome "bourgeois" . . . survivals'.[92] But the statement,
in context, seems directed at the reactionary nationalisms within socialist
countries, and perhaps also the nationalisms within advanced capitalist
countries. Thus we cannot tell whether Hobsbawm truly enlarges the national
process to include struggles, not for capitalism, but against it. Yet Hobsbawm
is not one to denounce any socialist revolution, including those in colonies.
Hence, again, the ambiguity.

Hobsbawm is not an 'imperialist economist', although some
other modern Marxists richly deserve that title. Yet Hobsbawm's position on the
national question is an extremist one, He is just about as strongly opposed to
national movements and national struggles as one can be without departing
entirely from the mainstream tradition on the national question, the tradition
which both he and I consider to be Leninist.

There is, in all of this, a very important question about
the long-term development of Marxist thought, a question which has immense
political implications for the struggles of the 1980s and beyond. I would
express the matter as follows. It appears that there has always been a
differentiation among Marxists, sometimes even an oscillation in the thinking
of a given Marxist at different periods, on the subject of national movements
and the national question. In each period there is a 'Luxemburgist' position which
tends to limit its vision to cosmopolitan or international horizons and be
suspicious of, or hostile to, the merely national forces. And there have been
the 'Leninists', taking more or less opposing positions, and not for merely
pragmatic reasons. The first great cycle of 'Leninist versus Luxemburgian'
quarrels occurred before and during the First World War. Leninism officially
won, and the Third International became a powerful force for national
liberation in the colonial world. Within national communist parties ofadvanced
countries, I suspect that the Luxemburgian view was rather powerful, and must
have had something to do with the far from proud record of some of these
parties in the matter of the liberation of 'their own' colonies. Nevertheless,
the Leninist position on the national question was the dominant one, and this
explains a great deal about the relative ease with which Marxism became the
philosophical underpinning of very many national liberation movements.[93] And
in the period from 1945 to the present the Leninist position has been far more
prominent than the Luxemburgian. This has been the era of national liberation
movements, and the theory and practice of'imperialist economism' has had precious little to offer this kind of
movement.

Today, however, a change seems to be taking place, at least
in the universe of discourse embracing Marxist journals and books in advanced
capitalist countries. It may well be the trend of 'imperialist economism'
renascent. Certainly it projects the view that national struggles today are of
secondary importance, emphasizes their limitations and failings rather than
their successes, and so on. And certainly this is done with the use of
theoretical arguments which would have sounded familiar to Lenin in his day.
(Capitalism is no longer national. Nations, states, and nation states are no
longer important, are indeed dissolving. Multinational corporations are not
fettered by national boundaries.) The world of the 1980s is of course different
from that of Luxemburg's and Lenin's time. But not entirely different. Old
arguments may seem still to make sense, and likewise the answers to these
arguments. 'Imperialist economism' may be as relevant today as it was in
1915-1916. Or as irrelevant.

The bottom line is political struggle. Perhaps thirty
million people still live in old-fashioned colonies and are still fighting for
their freedom. A billion people live and struggle in neocolonies. Arguments
like Hobsbawm's and those of the 'imperialist economists' can have a
progressive effect with regard to silly and reactionary national movements, of
which there are many. But they can have a damaging effect on anticolonial
liberation movements, like that of Puerto Rico. And they can be just as
damaging for countries like El Salvador in which there is a national struggle
for genuine state sovereignty and against neocolonialism, and likewise for
countries like Nicaragua which have won a precarious national liberation and
are struggling to hold on to what they have won. Arguments like Hobsbawm's do
not help these struggles at all.

Notes:

Notes:

59. Lenin's best-known statement of this position is in his
(1913) essay, 'Critical Remarks on the National Question', Works 20. The
following passage from that essay is still very frequently quoted by Marxists
of all tendencies, in spite of the fact that Lenin specifically rejected this
theoretical position in later years: 'Developing capitalism knows two
historical tendencies in the national question. The first is the awakening of
national life and national movements, the struggle against all national
oppression, and the creation of national states. The second is the development
and growing frequency of international intercourse in every form, the
break-down of national barriers, the creation of the international unity of
capital, of economic life in general, of politics, science, etc. Both
tendencies are a universal law of capitalism. The former predominates in the
beginning of its development, the latter characterizes a mature capitalism that
is moving toward its transformation into socialist society' (p. 27). There is
no problem with regard to the first of the two tendencies, nor with the concept
of growing internationalization of capital, science, etc. But the idea of
'break-down of national barriers' as 'mature capitalism' transforms itself into
socialist society was completely superseded. Lenin's later position, as I show
in the present chapter, substituted a theory of intensified and profoundly altered
national processes under imperialism for the concept of 'mature capitalism . .
. moving toward its transformation . . .' More precisely, the period of the
'break-down of national barriers', etc., was later seen by Lenin as having
ended in 1914.

60. See Luxemburg, The National Question, particularly the
essay entitled 'The Nation-State and the Proletariat' and other essays in the
1908-1909 series 'The National Question and Autonomy'.

61. The basic statement is Lenin's essay of 1914 'The Right
of Nations to Self-Determination', Works 20.

62. See for example Lenin's 'The National Programme of the
RSDLP', Works 19, and 'The Right of Nations to Self-Determination'.

63. The division is almost explicit in'The Right of Nations
to Self-Determination' and completely so in 'The Socialist Revolution and the
Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses' (early 1916), Works 22.

65. Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism is
of course the basic source on the economics of imperialism (Works 22, pp.
185-304). But, as Lenin warned in the preface to the book (which was not
published until April 1917), he had been forced to avoid political analysis in
this work, and concentrate only on economics, in the hope of passing the
censor. This caution is cavalierly ignored by very many modern Marxist and
non-Marxist scholars, who for that reason hopelessly misunderstand Lenin's
theory of imperialism. Because of the widespread misunderstanding, I give the
following partial list of the works by Lenin which present the political
dimension of this theory and which in particular discuss matters relevant to
the present essay: 'The Question of Peace', 21, pp. 290-4; notes for a lecture
in Geneva, Oct. 1915, 39, pp. 735-42; 'The Revolutionary Proletariat and the
Right of Nations to Self-Determination', 21, pp. 407-14;'The Discussion of
Self-Determination Summed Up', 22, pp. 320-60; 'A Caricature of Marxism and
Imperialist Economism', 'Imperialism and the Split in Socialism', 23, pp.
105-20; 'War and Revolution', 24, pp. 400-21; 'Revision of the Party Program',
26, pp. 149-78; 'Report on the International Situation' (2nd Congress of the
Communist International), 31, pp. 215-34; and'Report of the Commission on the
National and special note: see his Works 19, pp. 332-6 and 22, pp. 353-8.

66. 'Imperialism is the era of the oppression of nations on
a new historical basis', Works 39, p. 739. See also 21, p. 293; 31, pp. 215-18.

70. 'Lenin, in fact, did not recommend socialists in the
countries concerned to _favour_ secession except in specific, and pragmatically
identifiable, circumstances'. 'Some Reflections on "The Break-up of
Britain"', p. 10.

71. Works 29, pp. 172-3.

72. "'progressive" nationalism was therefore not
confined only to the category of movements directed against imperialist
exploitation and representing something like the "bourgeois-democratic
phase" in the development of backward countries', 'Some Reflections on
"The Break-up . . ."' p. 10.

73. Ibid., p. 7.

74. Ibid.

75. Pyatakov: 'we limit ourselves, in respect to the
colonies, to a negative slogan . . . "get out of the colonies!"
Unachievable within the framework of capitalism, this demand serves to
intensify the struggle against imperialism, but does not contradict the trend
of development'. Quoted in Lenin's 'A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist
Economism', pp. 64-5. For Luxemburg, see The National Question, esp. pp. 131
290.

76. From'Theses' of the editors of Gazeta Robotnicza (Radek,
Stein-Krajewski, and Bronski), English text given in Luxemburg, The National
Question, p. 303. Lenin's 'The Discussion of Self-Determination Summed Up', is
in part a reply to these 'Theses'.

87. There is ambiguity in Hobsbawm's position on the growing
obsolescence of states, or perhaps he has changed his mind: see his Workers
(1984) p. 22.

88. 'Some Reflections on "The Break-up . . ."', p.
9.

89. Ibid., p. 7.

90. In one of his characteristically sweeping and
unqualified generalizations about the national question, Hobsbawm asserts: 'It
is or ought to be obvious that the specific character of regions or
groups,'',does not point invariably in one direction . . . _Political
independence is one option out of several_. ('Some Reflections on "The
Break-up"', p. 20, italics added.) Does Hobsbawm mean to apply this
statement to colonies like Puerto Rico and Namibia which are struggling for
independence today? Is political independence just 'one option out of several'
for classical colonies? (Note also Hobsbawm's criticism of 'the assumption that
state independence, or what amounts to it, is the normal mode of satisfying the
demands of any group with some claims to a territorial base . . . a
"country",' ibid., p. 8.)

91. See 'Report of the Commission on the National and
Colonial Questions', p. 241.